Frederick H. Evans

Frederick H. Evans began his career as a bookseller in London, where he met and photographed many literary figures of his time — including Aubrey Beardsley and George Bernard Shaw. From the late 1890s, he devoted himself entirely to photography, choosing platinum-palladium as his exclusive medium for its extended tonal range and archival permanence. He photographed English and French cathedrals (Wells, York, Lincoln, Ely, Gloucester, Westminster, Bourges, Rouen) with an unprecedented attention to light, scale and architectural geometry. His most celebrated work, Sea of Steps (Wells Cathedral, 1905), is considered one of the masterpieces of architectural photography. Stieglitz dedicated the entire fourth issue of Camera Work (October 1903) to Evans, publishing six photogravures of his Ely, York and Westminster cathedrals — an honour previously reserved for Steichen and Demachy. Evans was a member of the British Linked Ring from the 1890s until the society's dissolution in 1909, before withdrawing in disagreement over the direction of pictorialism. He closed his Holland Street shop around 1915 as platinum paper became scarce during the First World War, but kept a personal stock that allowed him to continue printing privately into the 1920s (cf. In the New Forest, 1919, Metropolitan Museum). His prints are held at the Royal Photographic Society Collection (Bradford), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), and the George Eastman Museum (Rochester). His patrimonial rights lapsed in France in 2014, 70 years after his death. At Maison Picturale, his architectural and portrait photographs can be reinterpreted in contemporary platinum-palladium prints, on cotton paper 640 gsm, signed by our master printers.